You don't need to pay for Discourse, unless I've missed some major development. Though they do seem to heavily accentuate their hosting plans on their site now.

You don't need to pay for Discourse, unless I've missed some major development. Though they do seem to heavily accentuate their hosting plans on their site now. If you're happy to use Docker then the story of hosting it is pretty easy. I wouldn't generally consider PHP a pain to deploy either for that matter, but I'm sure that all depends on your particular situation.